Tony Robertson operates at the intersection of politics, business and the media. Tony is the former head of corporate affairs for Alinta Limited, at the time Australia’s largest energy infrastructure company with a market capitalisation of more than $6 billion.

Tony has proven expertise in the development of successful communications campaigns for leading companies and large member organisations. He has excellent media relationships at both corporate and operational levels and - having worked for both sides of the political fence - an in-depth understanding of political processes.

Tony’s passions and interests include renewable energy, media and politics, literature, music and The Fremantle Dockers.

I am not disappointed Tony. But I must point out my question was natural seeing as your recycling question is so clearly ALP/Green inspired and showing no conservative sense. Although you may pretend to yourself, if you so please.

Piers Akerman – Thursday, August 11, 11 (06:30 pm)

PRIME Minister Julia Gillard’s announcement of a national disability insurance scheme to be up and running some seven years in the future bears all the hallmarks of her predecessor Bob Hawke’s 1987 broken pledge to end child poverty.

AFR Thursday 11 August 2011 P3

Run nation like business:BHP head

I doubt if one government minister could run a listed ASX company yet the government is the biggest job of any country.
How many government ministers have done an IQ test to prove that they are capable of doing the job that they are given?
If you want to register for unskilled work with an agency they make you jump through hoops.

Government ministers clearly have gifts or they wouldn’t be where they are. They don’t need to get caught for lying, they only need to be accused of it and they would be gone .. if they were conservative. Macklin can face the cameras and say she isn’t trying to wind up the intervention in 2007, although she apparently took legal advice on how to do so. Rudd can claim he has a special relationship with Timor, but a month or so in and a bungled assassination later and he is pariah, but he can face the cameras and claim he is good. Gillard can bungle every department she administers and still she has a reputation as policy queen. Swan has turned this economy around since taking treasury, and in response to questions of how Australia will proceed in dark hours. He is claiming he will cut $50 billion in spending in the next year to balance the budget. Running into an election year. I don’t believe he will. I also don’t believe this promise to the disabled will be honored. It takes ability to get away with such lies.

Over at the Age I have some questions I need support getting answered. It is free to register and vote. 7 votes for each question, if you agree.

Filthy Phil replied to IQ
Fri 12 Aug 11 (09:42am)

In NSW we’re used to Labor promises about projects in the future. Make a big promise with some media fanfare, waste a few $million on reports, studies and committees and even set up a Gov’t Dept that doesn’t really have anything to do. A 7 year promise from Labor may as well be 1000 years as this Gov’t will be dead and buried long before we’re due to see progress on this announced policy.

Caz replied to IQ
Fri 12 Aug 11 (09:46am)

Sorry, DD. I tried to support your link but I’m not on facebook. Good luck with it anyway.

DD Ball replied to IQ
Fri 12 Aug 11 (12:45pm)

Thank you Caz. Registration is free, you don’t need FB, and voting is anonymous. There are no obligations and money won’t change hands. But I would love it were that Robertson character who claims in his bio that he has headed a major company and straddles the political divide yet asks a question about recycling of Telstra .. I gather he straddles the ALP/Green divide. I would love it if his question wasn’t first.

Caz replied to IQ
Fri 12 Aug 11 (05:39pm)

oops, sorry DD, I must have half read the instructions! Not like me. Much. I’ll give it another go.

IQ replied to IQ
Fri 12 Aug 11 (05:50pm)

DD Ball,
I`m sure that ministers in the Labor communist party have some gift or another but reading through Rocket Roosters list below i think it will take an IQ test to find out what their gift is if there is one at all that is.
Sorry DD but i`m not on face book either.

Miranda Devine – Wednesday, August 10, 11 (07:24 pm)

WHAT we’re seeing in London, as looters and rioters run amok and impotent police stand around watching, is the problem of politically correct policing writ large.

It is the triumph of a managerial, bureaucratic process-driven style of policing hatched in the rarefied confines of academia rather than the harsh reality of the streets.

Every now and then the two meet and you get bloody anarchy as a result.

There is reason for this tentative policing and it is political correctness. They tried to be brave and bungled a shoot to kill order, once. Tragic circumstance. This is a tragedy too. So was Cronulla, Redfern and Maquarrie Fields. I made my Picking Cotton series because I believe the issue is unrelated to political issues and strongly centered on hatred of police. But it is worse than that. Generations of privacy advocates have neutered police so as to maintain a balance involving law and order. I prefer police force.

Cause nr1: merit based promotion over experience/seniority based promotion. The unions always wanted and demanded experience/service based promotion. The Economist as liberals wanted promotion based off performance. They sugar coated this with equality an getting more women/ethnic minorities/whatever into senior positions. But the root cause Conservative Economics demanding performance based results!

You do not develop Loyality or Vocational drive by treating people as Numbers. Instead you get Career orientated head hunters!

Grow up and admit your Conservative economics is failing our public service!

DD Ball replied to DD Ball
Thu 11 Aug 11 (03:47pm)

Colin, just to be sure, you are claiming that the cause of the riots is merit based promotion among police? Was that the cause in Cronulla too? In Los Angeles? When did people develop such strong feeling about how the police were promoted? Do you think they know about NSW teaching service?

Bruce replied to DD Ball
Thu 11 Aug 11 (03:53pm)

Colin,

Are these the same Conservative economics that left us with a huge surplus as opposed to the loony left economics that have put us into huge debt in just four years?

Time to stop sucking your thumb and learn to be a man instead of a mangina.

Fair and Balanced replied to DD Ball
Fri 12 Aug 11 (09:07am)

Your so Funny Bruce....

Yes it is the same conservatives that left us a surplus, care of mining boom MK1..... along with runaway interest rates and inflation. Don’t you remember why Howard got chucked...?? He over heated the economy, through greed, and bad credit, just like in the US. That bad credit meant that the first time in history, youngins in Australia, could borrow 100% of the cost of a home. Plus a four wheel drive and a cinema room...oh and a really big flat screen. Think of all that extra GST (driven by bad credit) in Howards treasuary coffers…

Oh and what happened then, care of that small government, dregulation philosophy of conservatives. The Global Financial Crisis, you know that little problem that’s brought the world to it’s knees (in 08’ when Rudd and Obama were given a HOSPITAL pass) with countries on the verge of bankruptcy. Like Ireland, Spain, Greece, Japan whose debt is 125% of GDP, the US 75% of GDP etc.etc.

Australias debt is a whopping 6-7% of GDP, the second lowest of the G20 with Germany being the only country with less debt. Except our GDP is growing faster than Germany’s.

Never mind the glowing reports from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Australia’s economic preformance. Just listen to Joe (blackhole) Hockey, he’s going to give you unbias spin and the truth is he..??. Listen and believe what you want to believe it’s easier for you that way...is’nt it..??

Not the IMF with NO vested interest.

DD Ball replied to DD Ball
Fri 12 Aug 11 (12:56pm)

Collin, you haven’t replied yet, but I decided to re evaluate your contribution. I have decided you were giving us an example of political correctness, and re defining the observations to suit your response. Clearly that is a commendable form of satire.

The shrinkage of government is supposed to be more severe here [in the U.K.] than in America, where the supposedly “savage,” “draconian,” etc., cuts recently agreed to mean that for a decade Washington must scrape by on $43.7 trillion rather than $46.1 trillion. Really.

Those are cuts – should they actually occur (itself doubtful) – over each of the next ten years of, on average, $240 billion.

For such measly trimming of bloated and bloviating Uncle Sam we are subjected to an absurd orgy of sturm und drang.

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 13, 11 (02:33 pm)

There are all sorts of ways to measure a nation’s economic health. Stock markets are just one. The ratings agencies that influence stock markets are another, not that US President Barack Obama – in defensive mode this week after Standard and Poor’s downgraded the US from its previous AAA creditworthiness level – cares much for either.

“Markets will always rise and fall,” Obama told the US. “No matter what some agency may say, we’ve always been and always will be a AAA country.”

Whatever helps you sleep, Mr President. Instead of agencies and stocks, then, perhaps we should take a look at US housing prices. Here in Sydney, where the housing market runs on average anywhere from $500,000 to beyond $1 million depending on area, investors and homeowners are traditionally very acute observers of housing as an economic guide.

They might be in for a shock when they discover the asking price of many seemingly substantial properties Stateside.

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 13, 11 (01:24 pm)

A quick summary of the Third Test between England and India, currently underway at Edgbaston:

India’s first innings: Opener Virender Sehwag is out first ball.

England’s first innings: Opener Alastair Cook bats for 13 hours, features in partnerships of 186, 66, 122, 222, 9, 8 and 97, hits 33 boundaries and is eventually dismissed for a ground-record 294 after facing 545 deliveries.

Tim Blair – Saturday, August 13, 11 (01:22 pm)

British riots spread to the United States, according to the SMH. Just as well David Cameron has a plan:

The front-page error has since been fixed, and our riotey friends restored to their UK welfare hovels.

UPDATE. Equal-time typo news: an earlier version of this piece featured the word “massacrist” (a real word, apparently) rather than the intended “masochist”. Also, earlier this week my own paper accidently coined a perfect hair-related term for Kristina Keneally: the “former permier”.

The reduction target of the current Australian program is 5 per cent by 2020. That is only about half that required to stabilise carbon emissions to the extent necessary to avoid a potentially disastrous temperature rise.

Wow. Who knew that our sacrifices down here could save everyone else? In fact, that they could stop a drought in Africa:

To focus our minds on these realities, we might contemplate the current drought in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya. It is just one example in the current generation of the impact of climate change on those who can least afford it.

I doubt there’s a single scientist who’d blame that drought on our emissions, but the bishop has found a peer-reviewed expert to back him up:

In what one 70-year-old man in Kenya described as unseen in his lifetime, there has been a three-year period without any rain at all.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 13, 11 (03:20 pm)

Joe Hockey is out to shed his genial, jokey, nice-guy image. He knows that a would-be treasurer can’t appear soft if he is to have credibility. Far better to be seen as strong and mean.

So publicly Hockey is talking about a slash-and-burn cost-cutting Budget if the Coalition wins office. Even about abolishing entire government departments.

Behind the scenes he has seized control of the Coalition’s savings and cost-cutting process, which, before last year’s federal election, was primarily the responsibility of finance spokesman Andrew Robb.

Good stuff. Strength to Hockey’s arm:

There have been six meetings so far, with shadow ministers called in and told to be ruthless about finding savings in their portfolio areas. Hockey is going through everything, line by line, even homing in on rents paid for government buildings.

Hockey wanted the Coalition to promise big tax cuts at last year’s election. He lost the argument then, but this time he is getting his way - which dramatically increases the spending cuts he has to find.

People are fed up with waste, he tells colleagues - adding: “There is waste everywhere.”

Oakes does have some advice to Hockey - good advice - if his drive to find $70 billion in savings is to be taken seriously:

Exhibit A is Abbott’s ridiculously generous paid parental leave scheme, which offers stay-at-home mothers their full pay for six months capped at $75,000 - with a total annual hit to the Budget of $3.3 billion.

Previously secret documents, made public yesterday, also reveal Treasury told the government it would have to consider shielding the $36 billion network from private-sector rivals to help make it viable.

Internal reports released in response to a freedom of information request said Treasury officials had warned of the risks weeks after it was announced by the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, in 2009.

‘’Considerable financial risks to the Commonwealth remain, including uncertainty over the likely extent of private sector involvement,’’ a policy implementation report dated May 29, 2009, says. In early April 2009, Mr Rudd had unveiled the network as the ‘’largest nation building infrastructure project in Australian history’’.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 13, 11 (11:11 am)

TWO bits of footage tell us the core truths about Britain’s revolt of the ferals.

The first is film of a Malaysian student, dazed and bleeding from his head, being gently helped to his feet ... by thugs wanting to get at his backpack to steal everything inside.

The second is a BBC interview with two looters, giggling young women swigging stolen wine:

Girl 1: It’s the Government’s fault.

Girl 2: I know ...

Girl 1: I dunno ...

Girl 2: Conservatives!

Girl 1: Yeah, whatever who it is - I dunno.

Girl 2: It’s not even a riot - it’s showing the people we can do what we want.

Girl 1: Yeah, that’s what it’s all about - showing the police we can do what we want, and now we have.

Reporter: So do you reckon it will go on tonight?

Girl 2: Yeah hopefully, I want a few more things!

These are the two scenes I recall when I hear cause-pushers trying to excuse the jeering mobs of thieves, thugs and punks who rampaged through a dozen British cities.

These are the low-lifes I hear being described as revolutionaries, protesters and the deprived, understandably angry at cuts to government youth services.

The gap between what happened and what ideologues now describe is ludicrously, monstrously wide.

And that’s without allowing for the fact that many in the media wouldn’t report some hard truths about the rioters, not least the predominant race of the first troublemakers. Here’s part of an interview between a Sky News reporter and a young Ealing shopkeeper, “Big Jim”:

Big Jim: There was at least 100, 200 black youths ... just rampaging every shop ...

Reporter: You’re not being stereotypical there?

Big Jim: No, absolutely ...

Reporter: Are you sure that they were black? I’m sure they weren’t all black, were they?

Big Jim: OK, then. Let me just say they weren’t all black. I was the white guy there.

Reporter: Well, there were probably other white guys there as well.

The Left-wing Guardian newspaper in one report refused to identify a single ethnic or religious group in the riots but for one improbable exception - the only one it seems fashionable to despise:

“The make-up of the rioters was racially mixed ... but families and other local residents, including some from Tottenham’s Hasidic Jewish community, also gathered to watch and jeer at police.”

Jews were behind this? Seriously?

True, there were many “other white guys” among the rioters, but only a coward or a fool would ignore the racial dimension and the immigration failures that led to the initial violence, allegedly set off when a black hood with a gun was fatally shot by police.

But let’s focus on the muggers of that bleeding student, and on those two brainless boozers, whose only thought was “showing the people we can do what we want” by stealing yet more stuff that someone else produced with their honest labour.

Britain was set on fire by people like these, unshackled from shame, duty, compassion, pride or any love of home and suddenly freed by the crowd from any fear of arrest.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 13, 11 (11:02 am)

GOSH, is that really water, knee-deep over the Wy Yung Football Clubs oval in Bairnsdale? Drowning the skate park?

Excuse me for doubting my eyes, but Victoria’s former Labor government did tell us such floods would rarely happen again, thanks to global warming.

That’s why we couldn’t have a dam on the Mitchell River that’s now flooding Bairnsdale, you see.

That’s why Labor had to build a desalination plant instead, for $5.7 billion.

What an utter farce. And if your water bills hadn’t gone through the roof to pay for it, you’d laugh.

But let’s rewind. Melbourne has a million more people since it built its last dam, and we needed a new one to tide us over the dry spells in this land of droughts and flooding rains.

In fact, a dam reservation was decades ago set aside on Gippsland’s Mitchell River.

No wonder. The Mitchell flows so strongly that a Melbourne University water resources audit published by the Federal Government calculated that a dam there could harvest 435 billion litres a year - or about all the water Melbourne now takes from its 10 dams.

The cost? Just $1.4 billion, Melbourne Water estimates. That’s just a quarter of the price of the desalination plant being built near Wonthaggi - and it would have provided three times more water.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 13, 11 (10:59 am)

Publishers and literary prize-givers like to think that conservatives neither write books nor read them. Then along comes John Howard and his autobiography:

At the time of writing, Lazarus Rising was closing in on sales of 77,000, putting it a relaxed and comfortable 2000 or so copies ahead of the previous bestselling Australian political memoir, Bob Hawke’s 1994 tome The Hawke Memoirs. Paperback sales are expected to be solid, not least because Howard has written a new, headline-grabbing chapter in which he provides a detailed analysis of Kevin Rudd’s downfall and predicts, among other things, the disintegration of the Greens. Indeed, on the day we meet in mid-July he is still tweaking this new chapter to take into account Julia Gillard’s just-announced carbon tax scheme. “My big message,” Howard says of the fresh material, “is that at the next election the public will vote decisively one way or the other. They don’t like this cosmopolitan coalition.”

Strong paperback sales would push Lazarus Rising towards the 100,000 mark, which would put Howard up there with Bryce Courtenay and Di Morrissey, or Tim Winton for that matter....

He tries to keep a lid on it but it’s obvious he is chuffed to have outsold Hawke, who bested him at the 1987 federal election, Howard’s first as Opposition leader. Indeed, it’s as plain as Howard’s grin when I tell him the latest sales figures that he is enormously pleased to have outsold them all, on both sides of the fence: Malcolm Fraser, Peter Costello, Mark Latham, Tony Abbott. He’s even outsold his former defence chief, Peter Cosgrove.

(A quick visit to the literary tally room shows Latham and Costello are neck and neck, with the former’s 2005 Diaries and the latter’s 2008 Memoirs each selling about 50,000-55,000 copies to date. It’s early days for Fraser’s recent The Political Memoirs, co-written with Margaret Simons, though it was the surprise Book of the Year at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in May. Cosgrove’s 2006 memoir My Story has sold about 62,000 copies.)

Howard should earn more than $1 million from his book, which is a good read, written in an elegant, clear style that is the hallmark of so many fine conservative writers who wish to explain, not obscure.

In recent weeks, from the Wisconsin State Fair to Philadelphia, from Milwaukee to Los Angeles,reports of flash mobs of young Blacks attacking whites are stirring racial fears. The most dangerous factor in Black cities and neighborhoods are the hordes of young males, raised by one parent, dropouts from school, no skills, no jobs, no prospects, and lots of angry energy that is too often diverted into crime and violence.

A warning - frank and brave - by mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia:

It is understood the latest boat was carrying 59 passengers, who now join the queue of people slated to be sent to Malaysia under the terms of the agreement.

The people smugglers seem determined to fill the 800 places in the Malaysian people-swap deal as fast as possible. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were offering discount fares. I’d be even less surprised if they didn’t believe the Gillard Government’s threats.

UPDATE

From the boat people arriving yesterday, I get the impression the people smugglers have figured the Gillard Government won’t go through with its threat to send even children back to Malaysia:

Interviews with the 102 asylum seekers who arrived on the third boat, which arrived on Thursday, have revealed a third of the passengers were unaccompanied minors, bringing the total of lone teenagers facing deportation to Malaysia to at least 44, not including any on the latest boat.

‘’A lot of them were young, 16 or 17,’’ a source inside the immigration detention centre said.

It’s a game of chicken, and I think the smugglers have worked this government out.

“Standing here, I can certainly say to you it’s our expectation that the budget will return to surplus in 2012-13,” she said.

But Ms Gillard said that mid-year budget revisions to her government’s economic forecasts would have to take account of international events…

“We’re not immune from what’s happening in the globe,” the Prime Minister said.

Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Penny Wong have also softened their language on the 2012-13 timetable, referring to it as an “objective” or “plan” and conceding the task had become more difficult in recent weeks.

You must forgive them. Who would have thought that, having blown a massive surplus on junk, the Government would be left with bare cupboards in a downturn?

It’s just not fair, the way reality won’t cooperate with Labor’s idle dreams.

Both the home secretary, Theresa May, and the prime minister, David Cameron, were on holiday when the riots erupted last Saturday. Cameron only broke his holiday and arrived back in Britain after the third night of rioting.

His comments followed Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, rejecting May’s claim that she had ordered the “more robust” approach that quelled rioting in English cities…

May had “no power whatsoever” to cancel all police leave, Orde said on Thursday. “The more robust policing tactics you saw were not a function of political interference; they were a function of the numbers being available to allow the chief constables to change their tactics,” he told BBC’s Newsnight.

Governments and media reflexively blaming police for being either too tough or too weak against ferals long coached into a contempt for authority is part of England’s problem, and ours.

Andrew Bolt – Saturday, August 13, 11 (12:01 am)

On Q&A last Monday, Tony Jones was in the presenter’s chair – and the guests were Spectator Australia editor Tom Switzer, Gillard Government parliamentary secretary Mark Drefus, actor Noni Hazlehurst, Liberal Party MP Kelly O’Dwyer and former Hawke Government minister Graham Richardson. It was the usual Q&A balance – two right-of-centre types, three left-of-centre types and a left-of-centre chairman.

Being completely deaf, Nancy watches Q&A for the tweets which are placed on the screen by one of the program’s producers. During the discussion on Noni Hazlehurst’s reference to the book Go The # To Sleep, Jane Caro (a former Q&A panellist who appears regularly on ABC 2’s The Drum program) sent out the following tweet:

Shut the f&@$k up and go back to private school #qanda

Jane Caro

Yesterday, Nancy’s co-owner sent the following email to Ms Caro – whose obsessive dislike of private schools is a matter of public record:

My question is this. To whom on the Q&A panel was your message directed at? ...

Alas, Jane Caro did not reply… Ms Caro is a dyed-in-the-wool critic of non-government schools. In her anger at someone or other on Monday – probably Tom Switzer, who had criticised Ms Hazlehurst’s bad language – Jane Caro overlooked the fact that the entire Q&A panel (on that night) went to non-government schools. Here’s the list:

Tom Switzer: St Aloysius College (Sydney)

Mark Dreyfus : Scotch College (Perth)

Noni Hazlehurst : St Leonard’s College, Brighton (Melbourne)

Kelly O’Dwyer : PLC Burwood (Melbourne)

Graham Richardson : Marist College Kogarah (Sydney)

Tony Jones : Newington College (Sydney).

So there was Jane Caro telling (presumably Tom Switzer) to shut up and go back to private school – apparently unaware that every member of the Q&A panel went to private schools. If the ABC producer who put the tweet to air had acted on Jane Caro’s advice – the entire panel would have been silenced and the show would have ended prematurely. Can you bear it?

@DailyMouth Oops. I sourced the lyrics from a free site .. but I shoulda known ..

We live in great times

Wearable electronics usually trade flexibility for computing power, but engineers have created a new ultrathin device from silicon that can stick to skin like a temporary tattoo and are powerful enough to read brain signals.

Longlines .. prog rock genius

A fresh new track from The LongLines. Transcribing the tale of a beautiful woman who leaves her home and family to marry a rich man and live in America. Only to see there are poor people here, too...but she is no longer one of them. At least, not on the outside. The nature of pain is illus...

Then, as now, there was not one single decent ALP parliamentarian.

JOHN Howard had some comforting words yesterday for Julia Gillard as she prepares for the first Council of Australian Governments meeting since 1999 that will include more than two conservative states...

===

The bigots who accuse him are not peaceable

MAX Brenner says he is a man of peace who hates all forms of violence. So how has this chocolate maker become the target of anti-Israeli protesters in Australia who accuse him of being complicit with ...

Except what neither discuss is the corruption of the system whereby appointments are made for political reasons which is not legal.

THE Sydney Catholic schools system will introduce a teacher transfer program to remote schools similar to the one the government is likely to ditch when it gives state school principals the right to h...

===

Another ALP policy failure

BABIES and children arrived yesterday on the fourth asylum-seeker boat to reach Australian waters since the Malaysian refugee swap deal was struck, with more than 250 boatpeople now stuck in legal lim...

===

Because the disadvantage is not genetic, but the result of bad discriminatory ALP policy

COUNTRY schools are outperforming their counterparts in the big smoke, with an analysis of the national literacy and numeracy tests showing disadvantaged students in rural schools score higher than th...

I look forward to seeing who my grandad owed money to.

I don't like illegal downloads and won't do it.

A GROUP of 34 movie studios and TV production companies, headed by Village Roadshow, will take their fight over illegal movie and TV downloads to the highest court in the land after winning an applica...

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About Me

I'm author of History in a Year by the Conservative Voice aka History of the World in a Year by the Conservative Voice.

I'm the Conservative Voice.

I'm looking to make contact with those who might use my skill.

I have an m-audio mobile pre amp fed by the audiotechnica 2041sp condensor mic pack. Prior to 15/4/06, I'd used a Shure sm-58 that required a nuclear blast to register a sound or the internal mic of my aged imac, which has a penchance to recording my breathing. I also used a Griffin itrip, until the community convinced me it was not hiding my talent as well as the other mics.

I am a Writer and an occasional Math Teacher (Sir, what's the occasion?). I like to sing, having no instrumental talent (cannot even clap in time, and yes, I'm aware singing badly IS obnoxious).

I have performed the finale to Les Miserables before an audience of 500. I have also sung before a similar audience (students, parents) renditions of 'I Will' (Beatles), 'Mr Cairo' (Jon Vangelis) and 'I am Australian' (Seekers). Now I seek another profession because the audience hates me ..